Erik's Diary

Sunday, May 11, 2014

So I published my Android app yesterday. But it didn't work as expected. Information was missing in the display. After debugging I found out that the missing information was not there in the parsed result either. Was there a bug in the XML parser? I debugged that too, but could not find anything that was wrong. Yet when I made the same search in the browser the information was there in the result.

And then I found it! It turned out that my app was searching not today's date, but a month ago. Most of the information was the same, but some was missing. The reason for this was that I pretty late in the project removed the ASAP I had used before and instead used a date field, automatically filled in with a date, that should have been today's, but was actually a month ago.

And the reason for this is how Android Calendar work:

calendar.get(Calendar.MONTH) will get you the month number where January is month zero

calendar.get(Calendar.DAY_OF_MONTH) will get you the day of the month, where the first day is one

Not very intuitive, even if I assume ther is some logic in it. Anyway, a quick bugfix and new upload to Google Play means that very few users, if any, have been affected.

Saturday, May 10, 2014

It is an app for Local Transport in my home region, Skåne in the south of Sweden. It helps you find trains and busses (and perhaps ferrys) when travelling in Skåne and to adjacent regions like Copenhagen, Göteborg etc.
From a user perspective I have had two goals for the app:

It should be easy to search. You should be able to do most of your searches without typing. I do this by keeping history, making it easy to add favorites and having a preloaded list of the most important stations with the app when it is installed. The user also has the option to use her current location.

The information should be as accurate as possible. If I have information about delays, the app shows te delayed time rather than the one from the timetable (colored in red so that it should be clear for the user that there is a delay)

Sunday, June 12, 2011

Yesterday I published my first Android app on Android market, UnSilence. The background is that I tend to forget to turn my cellphone back to normal after I've set it to silent during a meeting. I have missed too many calls beacuse of that...

So UnSilence helps you be allowing you to set your phone to silent (with or without vibaration) for a period of time, and then automatically turn sound back on.

The main design goal was too keep it simple, one click to start the app, and one click to set to silent, that's all.

Friday, March 18, 2011

For a while I have been working on a project where we are trying to integrate a windows-based service in a Java EE environment. Basically the problem is to host an Ajax application under an application server like IBM Webspehere or Apache Tomcat. We also want to support portlets following the JSR 268 specifikation.

I googled around a bit and found lots of useful stuff, but nothing that did all that we wanted. The mainly problems was with headers and cookies, since we need to keep a session to the servicein the background we need to make those work. So I ended up writing my own. Not much code, but it might be useful for someone else, as it is pretty general stuff.

The service method

Since we want to handle all HTTP calls, we override the service method of HttpServlet. If you want only some methods (GET and PUT for example) to work you might just override doGet and doPost for example, but we want it all.. The implementation looks like this:

This is pretty straight forward. The protocol (http/https), server and port to use are configurable. We take the URI from the request and add the query string, if there is one. Together with the configure host etc, this forms the new URL, which we open, using the same method as in the call. We set some parameters, request headers and post data if there is any.

We then call the URL, check the HTTP response code, and take care of the headers and the response, which all are sent to the client.

Handle headersThe part that we really needed was the headers. This simply transfers the headers between the two connections, with a few exceptions:

There are two headers that we dont want to transfer from the client's request to our new request:

The Host header, since this will be our proxy server. The new Host header will be added automatically, so we don't need to think about it.

The Accept-Encoding header. This is a fix, the Accept-Encoding header turns gzip on, and since we have not implemented gzip in our proxy we don't want it. Another alternative would be to turn gzipping of requests off in our web server, perhaps this would have been better. If we do transfer th Accept-Encoding header, both servers might zip the content, which will not work.

Finally in this method we add our own headers, which is basically the reason why we need the proxy at all.

When we get the response back from the server we have the corresponding method to handle the response headers:

Thursday, September 09, 2010

I have been struggling a few days with a strange error in BlackBerry. My app works fine in the emulator, but when you start it on BlackBerry Bold (software version 4.5) you get a NoClassDefFoundError. On BlackBerry Storm (software version 4.6) it works fine, but on Bold2 (version 5.0) again you get NoClassDefFoundError.

Thrown if the Java Virtual Machine tries to load in the definition of a class (as part of a normal method call or as part of creating a new instance using the new expression) and no definition of the class could be found.

The searched-for class definition existed when the currently executing class was compiled, but the definition can no longer be found.

I have gone through all the changes since the last working version and I finally found it. I had added some fields like this:

Saturday, September 04, 2010

When I first started with BlackBerry development a few years ago it was difficult to find books on BlackBerry development. Since then interest has grown and today it is much easier to find good books on the subject.

I have just read one of the newer, BlackBerry Java Application Development: Beginner's Guide by Bill Foust. This is a useful book, even if you, like myself, is not a Beginner. It gives you a good overivew over the BlackBerry UI, which is probably what differs most from Java ME. It also has some material on more advanced subjects, like saving data and communicating over the network, which even though it uses the same classes and calls as standard Java ME is a bit more complicated.

Sunday, May 09, 2010

The last three years or so I have worked mostly with mobile java, starting with Java ME and later moving into BlackBerr and Android. A lot of things has happened, three ears ago Android existed, but ther were hardly any phones available and BlackBerry did exist, but I knew nothing about it.

Today the future of Java ME is uncertain. Programming in Java is a good option on most mobile platforms (except iPhone), but the strongest alternatives are Android and BlackBerry, not Java ME.

There are of course different reasons for this. On the technical side, the User Interface options are very limited. LCDUI is very restricted, you very quickly end up with skipping the higher level API, because it is too restricted, and using the Canvas API, where you basically have to paint everything yourself. Doing input in a canvas based interface is difficult, you can react on key down and up, but the standard does not really allow you to tell if the devices even has a keyboard, or if you need to display a virtual keyboard on the screen.

An even worse problem is the fragmentation of the market. Java implementations differ, and even if it is very probable that your java me code will run on most devices (if it is well written) verifying that it does is not a smal task. And if you want it too look good it is even worse. Emulators do not help much either, verifing that something runs in the emulator does not guarantee that it will work on the device. And it is not even sure that there is an emultor for your target device.

And phone manufacturers keep making new models all the time... Apple basically has one platform and offers upgrade for old versions (sometimes free of charge, sometimes at a small charge) but the competition has not learned from this. Instead they have incompatible version on different devices, where you basically have to test on, if not all, several different versions. Just keeping up with the new models from the main manufacturers ( there are only four or five) takes a lot of time. The so called java verification does not guarantee that your application will run on all Java ME implementations with the features you need, instead you have to verify it again and again as there are new devices.

All in all this leads to that Java ME is not a good alternative for your application development today. The future of java om the mobile is rather in Android or BlackBerry. That is if not one of the major manufacturers take steps to fix this. And frankly I don't see this happening.

An exception to this is possibly Symbian. Java ME implementation on Symbian is pretty good. But it seems like Nokia is more interested in promoting development in C++, or rather the very restricted C++ available on Symbian.

Wednesday, January 06, 2010

Today I released version 1.2.1 of Antenna. The new version includes both bug fixes and new features.

I made a mistake in the 1.2.0 release, which leads to a Null Pointer Exception if the Wireless Toolkit can not be detected. Antenna can detect a lot of toolkit's, but not all, so this has given users some poblems. A patch has been in the repository for a whil, but now it is in a release also.

When the 1.2.0 release was made, ther was no Java ME SDK for Mac available, but now there is. Unfortunately the file we used in 1.2.0 to detect Java ME SDK 3.0 is not included in the Mac version, so toolkit detection fails. This is fixed in the 1.2.1 release, which should work with Java ME SDK for Mac ( I haven't tested it myself, since I don't have a mac).

The realease also includes som contributed patches:- obfusactor arguments can now be passed to WtkPackage- Key stor type can be set in WtkSign- WtkRapc can build libraries

Friday, January 01, 2010

Our BlackBerry application is built using BlackBerry software version 4.5. Unfortunately this means that we can not handle touch events, since they are only supported from version 4.7. Since most of our users have 4.5 or 4.6 this is not an option. Up til now the application has had very limited functionality on touch devices like BlackBerry Storm, running in the so called *compatibility mode' with the virtual keyboard displayed all the time and only about half the screen available for our application.

But now we have made a few changes:We upgraded the Storm device software (to version 4.7.0.181). This solved the problem with the virtual keyboard, which now can be displayed only when needed.

We revised our application. The main problem is our custom object, which did not work well. This seems to be because the navigationMovement method is not called on a touch device. Since we had some application logic in this method in our custom object, it did not work well. The solution was to move the code to the moveFocus mthod, which is called both on touch and keyborad devices.

In the long run we probably will have to provide different installations for users with 4.5/4.6 or 4.7 software version. Still we do not support more advanced touch screen usage.

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

As a part of the new Antenna release I have reviewed the toolkits supported and which JSR's they support. The result is the matrix below.

As you see, many JSR's are widely supported, while others are supported only by a few manufacturers. If you need Bluetooth, PDA, Wireless Messaging, SVG or Mobile Media, they are available in most emulators. But if you need Internationalization, or Open GL your choice is more limited.

Many manufacturers have their own additional APIs. Most used is Nokia UI, which is actually also supported by Sony Ericsson.

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

My patch for antenna is now comitted into the repository and is available for download. Still no build available, you have to get the sourcecode yourself and build it, or send me a mail and I will send you a jar file. Hopefully the pre-built version will be available soon. Documentation is also not updated yet, but you will find some in this blog.

Wednesday, July 08, 2009

For building our Java ME application we use Antenna. It is a great tool, that makes automated builds possible and also works well as your regular build tool. But it lacks support for Java ME SDK 3.0 and other newer toolkits. Since we need that, I have made a contribution to the Antenna project, added as a patch yesterday.If you want to try the modified verions, send me a mail and I will send you the jar.

How it works

A key property of your Antenna setup is the wtk.home property. It should point to the base directory of your WTK/Java ME SDK installation. Antenna uses this to detect which toolkit you are using. In the older version toolkits are hardcoded into Antenna sourcecode. In the new version textfiles are used to set up available toolkits and their properties. Antenna goes through a list of toolkits, described in the text file autodetect.txt, and checks if the unique files for that specific toolkit are available. If they are, the right toolkit have been found, and properties are loaded from a properties file.

This makes it easy to add a new toolkit or new properties for the existing one.

I have also made some tests with Mpowerplayer, but the stub for CLDC 1.1 provided with Mpowerplayer seems not to match the specification. If I replace it with the one from Suns WTK 2.5.2 it seems OK. I have not tested Mpowerplayers preverifier, since it is Mac based and I use a Windows PC.

Antenna setup

Antenna properties are described here. They work as before, with the new feature that additional libraries can be defined dynamically, in the toolkit properties file, without any need for changes in Antenna source code. If I set up a property for a toolkit like this:jsr999=lib/jsr999.jar

I can then turn it on in my ant file by setting the property wtk.jsr199.enabled to true. I can also turn on all defined additional libraries by setting property wtk.all.enabled to true. During development I used this, since Antenna checks that all jar files are available.

Adding a new ToolkitYou can add a new toolkit to antenna just by editing a text file and adding another. Do like this:First you add a new line to the file autodetext.txt (in the res directory). It should look something like this:#sony ericssonsonyericwtk2;lib/semc_ext_jp8.jar;lib/cldcapi11.jar

Lines starting with # are comments. The lines defining toolkits should start with the toolkit property filename and then contain a list of files that are unique to this toolkit. File names should be relative to wtk.home.

Then you add a properties file, in this case sonyericwtk2.properties. It looks something like this:name="Sony Ericsson WTK2"include=wtk25nokiaui=lib/nokiaext.jarsemc=lib/semc_ext_jp8.jarvodafone=lib/vscl21.jar

Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Just a little trick I just learned. Sometimes I want a quick and easy logging, just to see what's happening in my program. The easiest approach, specially early in the project is simply using System.out. But when you run your program in the emulator you don't see system out anywhere. To see it you need the command line parameter /app-param=JvmDebugFile.

Just run the emulator as follows:fledge /handheld=9000 "/app-param=JvmDebugFile:bblog.txt"

In the bblog.txt you will get a lot of info, and your System.out output.

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

So far I have built my Java ME application using Sun Java ME SDK 3.0 and before the SDK was available with Sun Wireless Toolkit. But now we need to streamline the process and introduce automated build.

The tool we use for this is ant, with an add-on for Java ME called antenna. Antenna is an open source project, which provides support for operations like obfuscating, updating manifest and JAD files and signing.

As you can see, we have a directory called tools, where we keep the antenna jar and also a proguard installation, which we need for obfuscation.Antenna also needs to know where your wireless toolkit is installed and which versions of CLDC and MIDP you use. That's it!

PackageAntennas main function is packaging your application into jar and jad files, preverified, obfuscated and with correct manifest and jad files. You can do this step-by-step, with different tasks for each step, but you can also use the wtkpackage task to make them all.This is the approach we have taken.<target name="package" depends="compile"><mkdir dir="${dist.dir}"/><copy file="${basedir}/myapp.jad" overwrite="true" failonerror="true" tofile="${dist.dir}/myapp.jad"/>

Wednesday, June 03, 2009

Our application is currently based on Java ME and uses the lcdui to a 100%, even though there are some fixes to make it work better on BlackBerry. Since BlackBerry is getting more and more popular in the market we have decided to make a version that uses the BlackBerry native UI instead of Java ME standard lcdui.

BlackBerry does not allow combining its native UI with lcdui, which means we will have to convert everything, including the midlet. The majority of the code is however in our own classes, since 90% of tha application is Canvas-based. It seems quite possible to make them work in both environments.

Major changes will be:- our midlet is replaced by a UIApplication- the Canvas will be replaced by a MainScreen- instead of the List we use we will have a KeywordFilterField, which will gives the users better functionality.

Our components will be placed in the MainScreen (instead of a Java ME Canvas). To make this work we will use an interface for painting with two different implementations, that encapsulate Java ME Graphics and BlackBerry Graphics. We will also need to handle the different Font classes and lcdui Image versus BlackBerry Bitmap.

Our immediate gains will be:- scalable fonts, which is a problem for us now, since the Lcdui fonts on BlackBerry Bold are very large- some UI improvements, like the KeyWordFilterField instead of the List etcWe will also gain access to possiblities like opening an input field on top of ouyr Canvas, with we really need and have a better looking app.

Tuesday, May 05, 2009

Finding information on Java ME issues can be time consuming. A lot of information is available on the Internet, and Google finds lots of it. But most of the time you get Java ME information mixed with a lot of Java SE information.

To solve this I have collected a lot of Java ME resources and created a Google customized Search Engine. This is a first try, based on some links I had collected. There is certainly a lot more resources available out there. If you know one, don't hesitate to send me a mail.

Thursday, April 30, 2009

We have some memory problems with our Java ME application. On some platforms we get out of memory error after working a while. To some extent this is expected, and the error is handled reasonably well, but nether the less we wanted to get a view of how memory is used.

The Java ME SDK 3.0 includes some tools for this. They are not available in the IDE but has to be started from the command line. So you open two command line windows. In the first you start your midlet:cd C:\Java_ME_platform_SDK_3.0\binC:\Java_ME_platform_SDK_3.0\bin>emulator.exe -Xdevice:DefaultCldcPhone1 -Xdebug -Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,suspend=n,server=y,address=51307 -Xdescriptor:[jadfile]

This should start the emulator with your midlet. I choose the DefaultDldcPhone1 which is configured to have 4 MB of heap. You can change that in the device properties if you want to.

This should open up the memory profiler window. You then press Connect to cennect to your emulator instance.This will take a while but then you get a window something like this:Now you press resume and run your application and try to recreate your memory problems. After that you press Pause in the memory tool. This will cause the tool to get a memory dump from your runing application. You will get a memory map at the top and at the bottom left a list of classes and primitives. You can select a class in the list and see what instances exist. It is however quite difficult to find information this way. Better is to use the statistics button. This will get you a window something like this:

The data is:

class name or primitive. a [ means 'array of'

object number (or number of objects rather)

size

average size

% of heap

live %

old generation %

Since you can not search in this table I copy it al and paste into a spereadsheet, where I can find my classes easier.

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

I have been struggling a few days with getting Https communication to work in Java ME SDK 3.0, but with little success so far. To be able to create a Https connection I need to get the SDK to accept the (self-signed) certificate on my test server. The SDK does not however use the Java SE keystore but has its own (actually it has a lot of keystore's) with its own tool to update it. So far I have not managed to get my certificate into the right keystore. Tried asking on Sun's forum, but they don't seem to be interested in the problem at all.

So instead I used Nokia's S60 emulator, which gives me the option to accept the server certificate even though it can not be verified. Perhaps I should give up on the SDK for now, specially since the support and documentation is not really good enough.

Monday, March 16, 2009

Research in Motion BlackBerry phones support the Java ME standard, so for a Java ME developer is easy to get started on BlackBerry. But a few things do not work as expected...

MenuThe BlackBerry has a very consistent user interface, with a menu key and a back key. These keys can not be catched by your Java ME canvas, pressing them will not call the keyPressed() method as you might have expected. Instead the menu key will always open the menu. If you have not added Java ME commands to the Canvas, the BlackBerry will create a menu itself, with 'Close' as the only alternative. The back key will trigger the command with the command type EXIT if there is one and do nothing is there is no such command.

This basically means that you should always use Java ME Commands in yor BlackBerry application. There is no other way within the Java ME API to get the BB keys to work as expected.

Other keysThere are no Nokia-style softkeys on a BlackBerry keyboard. But there is a trackball (trackwheel on older models) and a qwerty keyboard.

The trackwheel sends Canvas UP, DOWN, RIGHT and LEFT codes and trackball press can also be handled and expected. Your application should probably use these keys a lot. Key repeat is however not supported, so if the user scrolls the trackball you will get a series of keyPressed events and no keyRepeated.

The qwerty keys will call keyPressed with codes as expected, you can use getKeyName. Just remember that some models have a smaller keyboard, with two characters per key. You will always get the first character.

The return, backspace and space keys will also deliver key events as expected. The shift and alt keys will however not. Instead they affect the keycode delivered to the application. That is ok for the qwerty keys, but also it means that you can not tell if the user is holding down shift and scrolling or pressing the trackball.

Fullscreen modeYou Java ME Canvas will always cover the full screen. The call to setFullScreenMode has no effect. This also means that the sizeChanged method will never be called. So you should make sure that your application does not depend on it beging called.

The conclusion is that the BlackBerry Java ME implementation is a good one, and can be very well be used as a base for your implementation on BlackBerry. But if your midlet is based on the Canvas class and developed for Nokia-style phones you will probably need to make some changes, mainly with menues, softkeys etc. You can them detect at runtime if the midlet is on a BlackBerry or not and adjust to that.

About Me

Working with software development (and enyoing it!) since 1984.
Main areas of expertise are databases (Oracle, mySQL, Microsoft SQL Server), Java and C/C++, but these are just tools, I see myself as a system developer rather than database or Java expert.
Keep it simple is my main rule. Make a clean, simple design, avoid complicated design if you don't really need it.